Everyone in the class will have read the assigned reading prior to your discussion leader responsibilities.   The next paragrpph is a slightly  revised version of some discussion-leading guidelines provided by P. Dunkel in her L2 evaluation and assessment course syllabus.  I include them here to illustrate some options, please do not feel tightly constrained by them:

A major component of this course will take the form of a seminar in which students have pportunities to share information and practice leading and generating discussions, etc.    For the readings assigned, you might take 15-20 minutes to explicate the reading assigned.  Your object during this phase is to help ensure      that we are all "on the same page" with respect an global appreciation for the reading.  Then, you would have about 10-15 minutes to lead participants in the class in a discussion about the reading, or to get them to work with the information in a creative way.  For example, you might ask them to work in a group (or alone, or in pairs) to prepare an instructional activity (or two or three) or generate a more general plan for teaching and/or esearching an issue that is tied to a theme discussed in the article.  It would be helpful to outline or prepare a handout (or overhead) to highlight the major content points of your own presentation phase for the class.  The major point of your "presentation phase" is to get your colleagues (1) to understand the content of the reading, (2) to engage them in some discussion about the reading, (3) to foster some substantive exchanges of ideas (positively or negatively) about aspects of the reading, etc.  In other words, you can plan to cover the content of the reading so your classmates are provided with opportunities to demonstrate their own understandings (as well as their own possible elaborations or, extensions of)  the author's ideas, etc.  This means that you may need to work with the information so that your classmates are able to react in personal/individual ways.  You are welcome to be creative in exploring ways to meet these goals.

Collaborate with anyone who might be working with you.

Examine our WWW course link to "Seminar Question Types."  Plans ways to incorporate such questions into our class discourse during phases when you are serving as a discussion facilitator.

Here is an additional  link to some university-level "Teaching Suggestions" made available through the University of Nebraska (some may be useful for our purposes).

Contact me (e.g., visit my office) to gain access to any office file materials I may have connected to your assigned reading(s).  For most of the reading assignments this quarter, I can provide some written discussion leader materials produced by previous members of this course.  Once I pass a file to you, you are welcome to use it as you see fit.  I only ask that you return the original set of materials to me intact and with the addition of any original materials you made decide to produce on your own.  An effective first step to accomplish this is to simply photocopy the complete set of previous materials when they are initially placed in your possession.

If you are working with one of the Celce-Murcia et al "Teaching Pronunciation" text chapters , be sure to examine a make efficient use of the discussion topics included at the end of each reading.  

Bring to class a sufficient number of some sort of a handout (required) to help focus our attention.

Be creative while aiming to engage our attention (and enthusiasm!) for the content of the reading assigned to your charge.

You might give us an pre-discussion assignment/task toward the end of the class immediately preceding your planned contribution. These should not be time-consuming but you could use them as a basis for starting your contribution off on the right track.

Once our E-Mail discussion list is up and running, you could post some pre-discussion topics for us to be thinking about ahead of time.

Initiate your contribution with some sort of a summary-review activity. At this point, try to focus our attention on the reading's content.

Plan some sort of an application activity/task.

You are welcome to incorporate within your allotted time slot such options as a panel discussion at the front of the room; dyadic, small group, larger group, and whole class configurations; straight lecture delivery; an interactive game focused on the themes of the reading; an illustration through micro-teaching; a role-play, etc.

Plan ways to make efficient use of the discussion supports included in the chapters or journal articles. For example, you may plan ways to focus our attention and engage us in an application activity if the authors provide any one or more of the following:

a) a table or figure,

b) discussion starters at the end of a reading,
 

-you might rank order these, adapt them, add to them, or use them for a model when generating your own,
 
c) a segment of an ESL lesson transcript, etc.